Frank Lloyd Wright’s alluring Alice Millard house, also known as La Miniatura, rises like a Mayan temple from a tree-canopied hillside on Rosemont Avenue in Pasadena. The 1923 Millard house may be less known to the general public than Wright’s other three “textile-block” homes in the region — Ennis, Freeman and Storer — but some architectural historians regard Millard as the finest. So does Eric Lloyd Wright, the architect’s grandson and a longtime Southern California architect who explained the leading reason for critics’ enthusiasm: “The way he set the house in that glen,” he said. Frank Lloyd Wright called for the house to rise above a ravine between two eucalyptus trees, which are still there, forming a cathedral more than 100 feet high over a lily pond.

The Alice Millard house was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first “textile-block” house, the term for the architect’s way of stacking decorative concrete blocks that were knitted together like fabric. In the three textile-block houses that followed Millard’s, Wright used steel threads of rebar, which, before the invention of epoxy coating, rusted and degraded the concrete. The lack of rebar in the Millard house has been a blessing, as the blocks have fared better since construction in 1923.